


Pretense

by Blue_moon_girl14



Category: Naruto, Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-05-13
Packaged: 2018-03-30 09:10:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3931186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_moon_girl14/pseuds/Blue_moon_girl14
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sakura has a secret, Naruto is unaware and Sasuke finds himself something to be, other than an avenger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretense

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic, I really wanted to try the idea of one of team 7 being a ghoul. I'm unabashedly saku-centric and team 7 centric. Hence this ficlet. And though I love Naruto and know he's more than just an easygoing, excitable blonde, I wanted him to have the slightest suspicions here.

Why'd he even wake up this morning? 

"I didn't always eat people's hearts." Sakura's eyes, amidst the backdrop of dark forest bark, dead leaves and freshly pumped blood, flashed a terribly brilliant crimson. "There are more tender organs that a ghoul may feast upon."

Skin. Liver. Spleen. Kidneys. Pancreas. Gall Bladder. Eyes. Brain. Tongue. Suddenly it's not just the cognizance of bare-nerve vulnerability, it's the fact that the human body is to ghouls as the coconut tree is to humans - every part, if not most, is capable of being utilized, edible. A forest of life that constantly renews itself, which any ghoul can simply fell to sate his hunger.

Sasuke finds himself unsurprisingly unsettled by this latest discovery. 

He turns to the Sound ninja unfortunately caught in the ghoul's clutches, Sakura taking a chunk out of Zaku's recently severed arm - his left deltoid, if Sasuke remembered his anatomy right. Zaku wore an expression wrought of pure horror and bone-deep terror, having just witnessed the sundering of his limb and about to be eaten himself. He turned his frightened eyes to Sasuke, who wished he'd flinched and turned away.

"H-How did you... Escape Lord Orochimaru's Curse Seal?" He wheezed, when Sakura slightly lifted the pressure on his trachea. 

Was this how ghouls operated on their prey, or was Sakura feeling especially sadistic today? "He was unsuccessful." Sasuke answered flatly, catching the beseeching looks Kin sent him as she held Dosu in her lap. He was just a frozen, blood-dried torso. 

"Can't believe an... Uchiha- ggh!" 

"You're loquacious." Sakura informed him pleasantly, once again tightening her fingers around his purpling throat. "I think I've wasted enough time letting you have a breath."

A glowing red kagune burst from her back and was positioned directly at Zaku's head. 

A murder of crows bursting from the trees - counting their glossy, foreboding bodies as their wings flapped wildly, feathers falling like sleep residue on the grass beneath his feet. As children, Itachi had watched him number each of them, but that day, there were so many, he'd lost his breath and made up his mind on a logical number that amused his brother (nothing could make him truly smile anymore, those days).

Doing what he did, in a split second, was like trying to count all those birds.

"Killing him won't solve anything." Sasuke said firmly.

A pause.

"You've got his arm and that other guy's legs. They won't snitch on you because they're good as dead already."

She inclined her head towards him, dark pink locks covering her right eye, the one without the kakugan. "Unusual for you to preach compassion now."

"Didn't I promise?" Sasuke challenged her in his tone of voice. Promise to preserve her humanity.

There was a pregnant pause that seemed like days to Sasuke's wracked mind. "I'm famished." She said, at length. "Thank your stars I was there to lop that snake's head off just as he was about to bite yours."

"I told you not to eat it. That flesh looked like candle wax."

"And there's no way I'm going to willingly ingurgitate any part of you. You're possibly the worst-tasting human scenario I've ever known, Sasuke."

That was about as close as Sasuke could get to a compliment from her. "Thanks." What made him the worst tasting human? She never even tried a phalanx of him.

Sakura did not look too happy when she released her chokehold on Zaku's neck. The Sound ninja collapsed on the leaf littered ground, gasping like a fish out of water. Purple mottled the pale skin of his neck, and his left arm was now a bleeding stump bandaged roughly with coarse cloth. 

"I'll be keeping this arm now." She clicked her tongue, jerking her forefinger at him like she was shooting a gun. Holding his severed arm like a butcher hanging mutton. "For a Sound genin, you're really feisty. That makes for a good body fat to muscle ratio, you know. That, and I don't feel bad about devouring you anymore."

The Uchiha held her wrist in a vice grip. 

Sakura gave Zaku one last kick in the chest, breaking several ribs, and nodded to Dosu and Kin, the former bleeding through his dismembered leg and the latter frantically trying to staunch the bleeding. 

"Take care of your teammates, little Kin." With a little snigger, of which Sasuke had an ominous feeling about, the pink haired ghoul looped one arm around Sasuke's waist and jumped up to the trees, where Naruto was laying unconscious. He didn't have the cowardice to turn away from Sakura's voracious feeding, but neither could he stomach it. 

"You know," he hated it when her voice turns like that, not unkindly, not quite honest either, "I won't be insulted if you don't look."

Sasuke fixed a level glare at her indulgent smile. "Just shut up and eat." Turning away from her meant that he had lost. Lost what? None of this was ever a game to him, so why did everything mean so much? Lost something she'd implicitly given him, perhaps?

"Hey." 

Tumbling out of her mouth, unbidden. Sasuke arched a brow.

"Thank you." For not looking away. For not turning back. For keeping my wrist from cutting open his jugular in front of children my age. For keeping what ruins of humanity I have left. For being there.

"Hn." 

She waits. 

"You're welcome."

Several meters up, amidst the dappled greenery of the trees, Sasuke could almost glimpse a patch of sky. 

Nobody tells Naruto. 

That had been their agreement from the start - keeping Naruto ignorant of Sakura's biological savagery. Obviously the dumb blonde's reaction to her diet mattered more to Sakura than Sasuke's, to whom she had blatantly displayed her ghoulish aspect, comfortable in brutalizing enemy ninja for food. Surprisingly, he felt better being the only person in their age group to know Sakura's real identity, other than the Hokage and Kakashi-sensei, as if by learning this deep and dark secret Sasuke had been privileged to learn of a secret so great and old and terrible and dead that everyone had forgotten but had great cause to worry still.

Do you think he'll hate me? Sakura's gaze lowered to the kunai being sharpened in her hand. 

Flickers, vestiges of emotion really, that's all they are. Whatever he considers this. He never looked at her askance, but locked gazes just as cool as he pleased. A line she vaguely remembers from Phenomenal Woman.

Don't be daft. He'd leaned the side of his body against hers in a manner that was not erotic, but was friendly. Reassuring. It just wouldn't be him to act that way, he told her, in a language she had thought she'd forgotten.

By the time Naruto had gained consciousness, Sakura was just finished spitting away carpal bones with a disturbingly lackluster finesse while Sasuke, who had finished rechecking supplies for the sixth time and securing the Earth and Heaven scrolls for the seventh, nudged the pink haired girl with his foot. 

"Don't want me to bite that, Sasuke."

"The idiot's awake."

A violent protest was wrenched out of his mouth when Naruto tried to sit up suddenly and got a skull-crushing migraine as reward for his efforts. He slumped against the bark of the tree and tried not to feel too much like the damsel in distress.

"Did we... Did we get them?" He asked wearily. 

The bastard's brow was arched so high it would have leapt off his dumb forehead if not for Sakura turning to him, beaming all the while.

"Everything's good, so far. We just have to get a move on to make it to the checkpoint early." Sakura supplied cheerfully. 

"Oh." Naruto clenched his fingers into a white knuckled fist, feeling perturbed by something unseen. An ache in his hand, telling him to observe. Observe what? Or had the storm pass by him already? 

Stomach growls interrupted his suspicions. 

"Hey, can you pass me whatever you've been eating, Sakura?" He was too busy trying to adjust his position on the hulking tree branch to notice his teammates' momentary flinch.

Sakura froze.

'THUNK!'

"Hey!" Naruto rubbed his swelling forehead. "Bastard, throwing rocks at me is enough to pacify your boredom?"

"It's bread, stupid." Sasuke replied succinctly, turning his nose up like a haughty duchess that Sakura had trouble keeping down a snort.

Sasuke, bless his brooding little soul, threw Naruto a piece of lumpy bread and smirked at the latter's rowdy disapproval. 

Later on while they were making their way through the forest, Sakura told Sasuke: "Thanks."

"You looked like you were floundering for a split second." Sasuke replied, dead-pan.

"I see." Then:

"Are monosyllables dropping out of fashion with you?" 

"Hn." 

He may have grunted defiantly.


End file.
